AMD’s latest roadmap reveals more details of its upcoming next-generation RS780 chipset. AMD plans to target the chipset towards consumer and commercial desktop platforms, with minor differences for each respective segment. AMD designed the RS780 to accommodate its upcoming Socket AM2+ processors with HyperTransport 3.0.

The RS780 sports a new graphics core with AMD’s Universal Video Decoder, or UVD, technology for hardware acceleration of H.264 and VC-1 video formats. The new chipset supports DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI digital video output interfaces. AMD also integrates an audio controller for simultaneous audio and video output over HDMI. The chipset also integrates HDCP support.

Additionally, the chipset supports TV-out, VGA and LVDS outputs. The graphics core also has two independent display controllers for dual independent displays. The local frame buffer feature will make a return on the RS780, allowing manufacturers to equip the graphics core with dedicated video memory. Users that prefer more 3D graphics power can install an external graphics card via a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot. The RS780 will also have additional PCIe 2.0 lanes for lesser slots.

New to the RS780 platform is the SB700 south bridge. The SB700 does away with all PCIe lanes and only supports PCI, because all PCIe functionality has moved to the north bridge. AMD increases USB support to 12 USB 2.0 ports plus an additional 2 USB 1.1 ports. The new south bridge supports up to six SATA 3.0 Gbps ports with RAID 0, 1 and 10 support. IDE remains a supported feature of the SB700. However, AMD designates the IDE port for double duty – a physical PATA port or for HyperFlash. HyperFlash is AMD’s name for its Intel Turbo Memory competitor.

RS780 for commercial platform has one minor difference compared to the consumer platform. AMD designates a Broadcom BCM5761 managed NIC controller for the commercial platforms. The managed NIC allows for remote management, similar to Intel’s AMT technology. AMD also recommends a TPM 1.2 module for greater security.

Expect AMD to unveil the RS780 sometime next year.

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This argument was valid back in the single core days. But nowadays when we have people whine "YOU DON'T NEED 2 CORES!!!" or "YOU DON'T NEED 4 CORES!!! YOU ARE NEVER USING THEM ANYWAY", I don't feel that argument is valid anymore.

On one side we have people whining about idle cpu cores, on the other side we have people whine about cpu usage. What's wrong with the world?

regardless of your processing power,, if i can buy a chipset w/ raid 5 or one w/o, even if the raid5 is "software"... ill take the one with raid 5... its the most economical way of having some piece of mind. like right now 500gb drives are approaching $100... so 5 drives is 2TB of data for $500 and when a drive fails... you dont lose your data. thats worth the cpu cycles in my book...

theres no way im spending $200+ for raid5 hardware...

and as the guy above me said, in the multi-core age it seems everyone always has some spare processing power around... so realistically it'll have almost zero effect on real-world or noticable system performance.for the price of a harrdware raid5 controller i can get a quad core cpu... surely it has some extra processing cycles sitting around.

exactly. you cant install windows on a raid5 partition unless you have a raid controller.and even if you could, what if windows becomes corrupted, how would you rebuild or see the status of the array??? much better if you don't rely on the os for that.

so u dont think ich9/8/7/6 raid 5 is reliable? ive been using it for a long time, it's great...ive seen no reliable information or even indications that its not as reliable as any other raid controller.

quote: ill take the one with raid 5... its the most economical way of having some piece of mind.

Interesting. Another person whom doesn't know what RAID 5 is for or any RAID for that matter. RAID is not for backup since by definition it cannot be a backup solution. You can spend all day pretending your data is safe, but at the end of the day, it's not. The only thing a RAID 5 array provides is increased throughput and some redundancy in case a single drive in an array dies. At this point you can replace the drive and wait for the array to rebuild itself. You are afforded no protection from power surges or dips or another piece of hardware in the system which may take out your drives.

If you want peace of mind, you better start making daily backups, preferably to a permanent, non-magnetic storage media which is properly stored at an offsite location.

quote: theres no way im spending $200+ for raid5 hardware...

Enjoy losing your array if you ever have to change motherboards. That can include replacing your current one with the exact same model. I've heard so many sob stories about people losing their arrays because they had to RMA their board.